On Pedantry

My friend and fellow pedant, Eric Thomson, detected a howler on the very first page of a book on pedantry — Arnoud S. Q. Visser, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 1: Despite the warnings of those around her, Dorothea married him, thus embarking on a short-lived, unhappy wedded life in a gloomy parsonage filled with books and silence. Mr. Casaubon, however, didn't live in a parsonage. See George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 1, chapter 5: Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon's house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the morning sermon. Id., Book 1, chapter 9: Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.